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Hello. My name's Dale Fisher. I'm an infectious disease physician from Singapore, but I'm here as chairman of the Global Outbreak Response Network.

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I guess to understand the value of the lab,

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you first have to understand the complexities of the organisation and where we've been going since the year 2000.

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We started at 60 institutions. We're now up to over 270 and these are United Nations agencies, including UNICEF, W.H.O., IFC, with NGOs such as MSF,

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where national public health institutes, such as many CDC is Robert Koch Institute, many, many of these many academic institutions, minors in US.

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But there's many universities and other health care providers around the world that all have something

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to contribute to to outbreak response which or alert and response which is our our core being.

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We work on the mandate that actually no one institution can provide everything for an outbreak.

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So we all need each other, but and we complement each other without competing against each other.

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So when you bring that sort of complexity together from all corners of the world,

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I might add, and then you think, okay, after 20 years, we need a strategy.

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We need to think about where we've been, what the world needs now, what, what we can offer, and, and therefore, what is our strategy?

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So, so we we like the idea of the strategy so that for the next, you know,

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intentions for the next four years of what would be our direction and it's been a long process.

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I would say it's been very short process. But over the last six or eight months we've been moving there where we're close to finishing,

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but we've learnt a lot and gained a lot out of the process.

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Well, the lab and the scenarios in the lab help you really understand that your strategy

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has to be sort of have the capacity to to deal with whatever can happen next.

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We can't predict, especially in this outbreak response setting that we're in now.

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We can't really be sure what it's what what the the contexts are going to be like in in a year or two or five.

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So any strategy almost needs to be sort of future proof, if you like.

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And, and we found,

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as we did that with the with the scenarios that that there were many components that that could be the components were very similar.

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It was about how you would emphasise them or act on them, depending on on how the mood of the world changed.

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Many good stories coming out of the the process were probably one of the most surprising things was that I started off a bit cynical,

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I'll have to say. But others others got it much faster than me.

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And and this diverse group of institutions and and individuals warmed to it very quickly.

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And actually, people really wanted to have their their voice heard.

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They wanted to be part of the strategy development.

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And that was perhaps my biggest surprise. But in doing this,

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it certainly brought broad partners together and and engaging all the partners in the network that actually gave them a sense of empowerment.

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They just weren't being told what the direction of the network was.

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They were the network helping to find the direction.

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And it also helped partners, I think, understand their role in the network because we often live in silos.

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But but once you start to see what's important to other people in the network and you can see, yeah, you, you see where you fit.

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If I can just describe a few other things that, that,

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that I think were important was that I felt that a lot of the outcomes that we came up with were,

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was somewhat intuitive, but the process really helped us provide the detail within those sort of high level strategic directions.

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But it also with all the, the input from the members of the network we helped on, well,

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we were led to understand or have a much better understanding of the challenges that we could foresee and the

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but actually a better understanding of of what what would be the advantages of going in a certain direction.

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So I the the high level intuitive strategy that we probably could have written down very quickly actually became much more crystallised and much,

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much clearer as well as having all the buy in from the partners.

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The process really does give the outcomes much, much more credibility.

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And when you can say, this is our strategy, we've gone through this process,

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you know, well, well over 100 of the institutions have put into this in some time.

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And and and, in fact, the the other perhaps major component of this is is the advocacy that that's come with

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this sort of a side benefit that we've been talking to all our our stakeholders,

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as well as our partners, and just talking about go on and what we are and what we do and what we can do

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is a is a really profound act of advocacy during the last eight or so months.